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The Ecstasy of Communication PDF
The Ecstasy of Communication PDF
BAY PRESS
The Anti-aesthetic.
JEAN BAUDRILLARD
In a certain way all this still exists, and yet in other respects it is all dis-
appearing. The description of this whole intimate universe-projective,
imaginary and symbolic-still corresponded to the object's status as mirror
of the subject, and that in turn to the imaginary depths of the mirror and
"scene": there is a domestic scene, a scene of interiority, a private space-
time (correlative, moreover, to a public space). The oppositions subject/
object and public/private were still meaningful. This was the era of the
discovery and exploration of daily life, this other scene emerging in the
shadow of the historic scene, with the former receiving more and more
symbolic investment as the latter was politically disinvested.
But today the scene and mirror no longer exist; instead. there is a screen
and network. In place of the reflexive transcendence of mirror and scene,
126
The Ecstasy of Communication 127
Thus the body, landscape, time all progressively disappear as scenes. And
the same for public space: the theater of the social and theater of politics are
both reduced more and more to a large soft body with many heads. Adver-
tising in its new version-which is no longer a more or less baroque,
utopian or ecstatic scenario of objects and consumption, but the effect of an
omnipresent visibility of enterprises, brands, social interlocuters and the
social virtues of communication-advertising in its new dimension invades
everything, as public space (the street, monument, market, scene) dis-
appears. It realizes, or, if one prefers, it materializes in all its obscenity; it
monopolizes public life in its exhibition. No longer limited to its traditional
language, advertising organizes the architecture and realization of super-
130 The Anti-Aesthetic
objects like Beaubourg and the Forum des HaIles, and of future projects
(e.g., Parc de la Villette) which are monuments (or anti-monuments) to
advertising, not because they will be geared to consumption but because
they are immediately proposed as an anticipated demonstration of the
operation of culture, commodities, mass movement and social flux. It is OUr
only architecture today: great screens on which are reflected atoms,
particles, molecules in motion. Not a public scene or true public space but
gigantic spaces of circulation, ventilation and ephemeral connections.
It is the same for private space. In a subtle way, this loss of public space
occurs contemporaneously with the loss of private space. The one is no
longer a spectacle, the other no longer a secret. Their distinctive opposition,
the clear difference of an exterior and an interior exactly described the
domestic scene of objects, with its rules of play and limits, and the
sovereignty of a symbolic space which was also that of the subject. Now this
opposition is effaced in a sort of obscenity where the most intimate
processes of our life become the virtual feeding ground of the media (the
Loud family in the United States, the innumerable slices of peasant or
patriarchal life on French television). Inversely, the entire universe comes to
unfold arbitrarily on your domestic screen (all the useless information that
comes to you from the entire world, like a microscopic pornography of the
universe, useless, excessive, just like the sexual close-up in a porno film):
all this explodes the scene formerly preserved by the minimal separation of
public and private, the scene that was played out in a restricted space,
according to a secret ritual known only by the actors.
Certainly, this private universe was alienating to the extent that it sepa-
rated you from others-or from the world, where it was invested as a
protective enclosure, an imaginary protector, a defense system. But it also
reaped the symbolic benefits of alienation, which is that the Other exists,
and that otherness can fool you for the better or the worse. Thus consumer
society lived also under the sign of alienation, as a society of the spectacle.6
But just so: as long as there is alienation, there is spectacle, action, scene. It
is not obscenity-the spectacle is never obscene. Obscenity begins
precisely when there is no more spectacle, no more scene, when all becomes
transparence and immediate visibility, when everything is exposed to the
harsh and inexorable light of information and communication.
We are no longer a part of the drama of alienation; we live in the ecstasy of
communication. And this ecstasy is obscene. The obscene is what does
away with every mirror, every look, every image. The obscene puts an end
to every representation. But it is not only the sexual that becomes obscene in
pornography; today there is a whole pornography of information and com-
munication, that is to say, of circuits and networks, a pornography of all
The Ecstasy of Communication 131
was free by virtue of space is no longer. Speech is free perhaps, but I am less
free than before: I no longer succeed in knowing what I want, the space is so
saturated, the pressure so great from all who want to make themselves heard.
I fall into the negative ecstasy of the radio.
There is in effect a state of fascination and vertigo linked to this obscene
delirium of communication. A singular form of pleasure perhaps, but alea-
tory and dizzying. If we follow Roger CaiIlois 7 in his classliIcation of games
(it's as good as any other)- games of expression (mimicry), games of
competition (agon), games of chance (alea), games of vertigo (ilynx) - the
whole tendency of our contemporary "culture" would lead us from a
relative disappearance of forms of expression and competition (as we have
remarked at the level of objects) to the advantages of forms of risk and
vertigo. The latter no longer involve games of scene, mirror, challenge and
duality; they are, rather, ecstatic, solitary and narcissistic. The pleasure is no
longer one of manifestation, scenic and aesthetic, but rather one of pure
fascination, aleatory and psychotropic. This is not necessarily a negative
value judgment: here surely there is an original and profound mutation of the
very forms of perception and pleasure. We are still measuring the conse-
quences poorly. Wanting to apply our old criteria and the reflexes of a
"scenic" sensibility, we no doubt misapprehend what may be the occur-
rence, in this sensory sphere, of something new, ecstatic and obscene.
One thing is sure: the scene excites us, the obscene fascinates us. With
fascination and ecstasy, passion disappears. Investment, desire, passion,
seduction or again, according to Caillois, expression and competition - the
hot universe. Ecstasy, obscenity, fascination, communication or again,
according to Caillois, hazard, chance and vertigo-the cold universe (even
vertigo is cold, the psychedelic one of drugs in particular).
In any case, we will have to suffer this new state of things, this forced
extroversion of all interiority, this forced injection of all exteriority that the
categorical imperative of communication literally signifies. There also, one
can perhaps make use of the old metaphors of pathology. If hysteria was the
pathology of the exacerbated staging of the subject, a pathology of expres-
sion, of the body's theatrical and operatic conversion; and if paranoia was
the pathology of organization, of the structuration of a rigid and jealous
world; then with communication and information, with the immanent prom-
iscuity of all these networks, with their continual connections, we are now in
a new form of schizophrenia. No more hysteria, no more projective para-
noia, properly speaking, but this state of terror proper to the schizophrenic:
too great a proximity of everything, the unclean promiscuity of everything
which touches, invests and penetrates without resistance, with no halo of
private protection, not even his own body, to protect him anymore.
The Ecstasy of Communication 133
References
1. Le Systeme des objets (Paris: Gallimard, 1968). [Tr.]
2. Baudrillard is alluding here to Marcel Mauss's theory of gift exchange and Georges
Bataille's notion of depense. The "accursed portion" in the latter's theory refers to what-
ever remains outside of society's rationalized economy of exchanges. See Bataille, La Part
Maudite (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1949). Baudrillard's own conception of symbolic
exchange, as a form of interaction that lies outside of modern Western society and that
therefore "haunts it like its own death," is developed in his L' echange symbolique et la mort
(Paris: Gallimard, 1976). [Tr.]
3. See Roland Barthes, "The New Citroen," Mythologies. trans. Annette Lavers (New York:
Hill and Wang, 1972), pp. 88-90. [Tr.J
4. 1\vo observations. First, this is not due alone to the passage, as one wants to caIl it, from a
society of abundance and surplus to a society of crisis and penury (economic reasons have
never been worth very much). Just as the effect of consumption was not linked to the use
value of things nor to their abundance, but precisely to the passage from use value to sign
value, so here there is something new that is not linked to the end of abundance.
Secondly, all this does not mean that the domestic universe-the home, its objects,
etc.-is not still lived largely in a traditional way-social, psychological, differential, etc.
It means rather that the stakes are no longer there, that another arrangement or life-style is
virtually in place, even if it is indicated only through a technologistical discourse which is
often simply a political gadget. But it is crucial to see that the analysis that one could make of
objects and their system in the '60s and '70s essentially began with the language of adver-
tising and the pseudo-conceptual discourse of the expert.··Consumption," the "strategy of
desire," etc. were first only a metadiscourse, the analysis of a projective myth whose actual
effect was never really known. How people actually live with their objects-at bottom, one
knows no more about this than about the truth of primitive societies. That's why it is often
problematic and useless to want to verify (statistically, objectively) these hypotheses, as one
ought to be able to do as a good sociologist. As we know, the language of advertising is first
for the use of the advertisers themselves. Nothing says that contemporary discourse on
computer science and communication is not for the use alone of professionals in these fields.
(As for the discourse of intellectuals and sociologists themselves ... )
134 The Anti-Aesthetic
5. For an expanded explanation of this idea, see Baudrillard's essay "La Precession des
simulacres," Simulacres et Simulation (Paris: Galilee, 1981). An English translation
appears in Simulations (New York: Foreign Agent Series, Semiotext(e) Publications,
1983). [Tr.]
6. A reference to Guy Debord's La societe du spectacle (Paris: Buchet-Chastel, 1968). [Tr.]
7. Roger Caillois, Les jeux et les hommes (Paris: Gallimard, 1958). [Tr.]